I have received 8 SalesForce.com certifications and have been using SalesForce for nearly 9 years and have learned a lot about the system. I have used it to migrate companies from past on premise systems to the cloud. I have also handled all data migrations and even moved one organization from Unlimited Edition to Enterprise Edition through setting up a new system and migrating all data. I believe in the vision in SalesForce and want to help others leverage its power.

Thursday, May 29, 2014

SalesForce Two Factor Authentication App

Recently I was playing around in the iOS app store and searched for SalesForce. I happened to be looking to see what apps were now integrated with SalesForce. However, in doing so, I found a gem of an app that SalesForce themselves make.It is called SalesForce#. This app essentially lets you enable two-factor authentication in your SalesForce org. For those of you that don't know what two factor authentication is, it is requiring another piece of information from a user (like a code generated from a phone, etc.) in addition to their password to access a service. This helps reduce the risk of someone hacking a password and being able to access your systems/information.Now, with SalesForce#, you can set it up so that only specific users, say your Administrators, would have to use it. What would happen is after they enter their usual SalesForce User Name and Password, they would enter the token ID from their phone app, which looks like this:

From here, you can see that the user is being prompted to enter the code generated by SalesForce#. So, all the user has to do is open up the SalesForce# app on their phone, get said code, and enter it to complete the logon. It is a very nice, slick way to enable two factor authentication fully supported by SalesForce. This two factor authentication is basically a more enhanced version of the traditonaltext message you get from SalesForce with a verification code. That verification is only sent once to the user when logging in from a new computer and can't be "reset". Whereas the use of SalesForce# can be set when they access the Reports Tab in SalesForce and also it can be "removed" on a user, or all users, to force them to have to re-authenticate themselves. Although not a requirement for many organizations, it is a good tool to have in the toolbox.To set up SalesForce# all you need to do is first download it from the App Store (iTunes). From there, youthen have to go to the user's record in SalesForce and click "Add" beside Time Based Token" on their record. Then, from there, the user will be prompted to log in again, and after doing so, will be shown this screen to add their token to their account:Screenshot of Where to Enable Two Factor: